Fall 2016: Budget Build Recommendation [Updated for Fall 2016]

Hello everyone, today we present you with a new type of article here at GND-Tech. We’re debuting the first of a series of Budget PC Build Recommendations that we plan on updating every few months or so to keep up with the ever increasing pace of new technology and hardware.

We’re breaking the series down into four categories. The categories are Budget, Mid-Range, High End and Infinite Budget. Keep in mind, we are not sponsored so there is no bias to be found here, but that unfortunately means we cannot afford to actually buy all these components and put them together and take pictures for our readers. This is a recommendation guide.

So there it is, our recommended budget build. As you can see we even came in just about $5 under budget and you’re left with a fantastic budget 1080p Gaming Machine.
We leave the peripherals out of these guides because there are so many choices that are more subjective than hardware. People often have extra mice, keyboards and monitors laying around from old computers which will do the job just fine while they wait to afford newer ones.
As you all probably noticed, there is no Operating System listed in this build. We focused on the hardware and leave it up to the user to decide which OS they choose and how they obtain it.

Now we’d like to breakdown why we chose the parts we did and why we believe $585 to be a fair price for a budget PC. Firstly, $585 is just about the bare minimum you can go with to create a ‘good’ and future proofed 1080p gaming machine that does more than just plays games on the lowest possible settings. This particular system is on the latest chipset with a Skylake CPU and a lot of room for potential upgrades in the future. One particular upgrade we recommend doing as soon as money permits would be getting rid of the stock cooler, which will serve it’s purpose just fine with this CPU but acoustics could be better. Look at something like the Cryorig H7, which is a fantastic budget CPU cooler. Also, we recommend adding any decent and quiet 120mm fan to the rear of the case for additional airflow. This will be a cool running system regardless but more airflow never hurt anyone.

Yes, you can throw in an extremely low end GPU, a Pentium, cheapo $10 PSU and what not but here at GND-Tech we don’t settle for something just decent. The idea behind this budget build was to create the absolute best budget PC for under $600 and that’s what we did.

Choosing these parts were fairly straight forward as there are clear winners in all sectors of hardware. Power Supply was the trickiest as you don’t need a lot of power but you need something that will last and output its wattage properly. We also decided to go with a lower capacity SSD instead of a mass storage HDD as the improvement in speeds is worth the loss of spare. You’re always open to add in a hard drive down the line if you need more room.

We went Micro-ATX because the cases and motherboards are somewhat cheaper. We were looking at the Thermaltake T1 Urban for our case choice but the price, superior internal design and airflow of the Fractal Design Core 1100 led to us choosing it as our case for this build. Our motherboard choice is a very basic one, with no bells or whistles. It has one PCIE x16 slot and has a surprisingly good layout for a budget MATX board. It’s a basic but fully functional H110 motherboard that will work great with the non-overclockable i5 6400. It’s also a low power board which will help keep strain off the relatively low wattage PSU.

Speaking of Chipset, we went with the lowest end Skylake i5 Quad Core Processor. Some may say, why not go with a higher end i3 and save some money which having higher clock speeds. Well, we could have but I don’t see the i3 as a good solution for the future. Many games take advantage of at least 4 cores these days and while in some cases perhaps you could get slightly better performance with a higher clocked i3, I believe the 3.3Ghz Turbo on the i5 6400 will be more than ample for this budget system.

To wrap this up, we hope you enjoyed this article and we hope you find use for it when designing your very own budget PC build. Please let us know in the comments what you think or ask us any questions you have and tell us about any builds you’d like us to cover.

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